Letter from Back East: Roanoke’s ‘Lost Colony’ Was Never Lost, New Book Says

Virginia Dare, the first Anglo child born in North America,
sustained herself on nuts, berries, and product endorsements.
(Virginia Dare Winery)

(NYTimes) In 1590, the would-be governor of a colony meant to be one of England’s first outposts in North America discovered that more than 100 settlers weren’t on the small island where he left them.
More than 400 years later, the question of what happened to those settlers, who landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of modern North Carolina, has grown into a piece of American mythology, inspiring plays, novels, documentaries and a tourism industry in the Outer Banks. Continued

Lazarus Stewart: Colonial Custer

"Massacre of the Indians at Lancaster by the Paxton Boys in 1763." (John Wimer, 1841)

(Wikipedia) Captain Lazarus Stewart was an 18th century Pennsylvanian frontiersman and leader of the Paxton Boys. He achieved notoriety by leading the massacre of the Susquehannocks in 1763, and was a prominent military commander — on the Yankee side — in the Pennamite Wars. He met his death in battle with the Loyalists and Iroquois at the Wyoming Massacre, in an attack precipitated by his own rashness. Continued

"Massacre of Wyoming"

Letter from Back East: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

The 1935 Hurricane memorial on Upper Matecumbe Key, Florida.

After World War One, veterans were offered a service bonus payable in 1945. And that was a fine and good thing, but along came the Great Depression and many of the veterans, displaced by the economic hard times, lobbied Congress to pay the bonus sooner.
In 1932 thousands of them demonstrated in Washington D.C. They set up a camp and there they stayed. President Hoover eventually ordered the marchers out of the city by force. It wasn't a pretty sight.
The next year the marchers returned and President Roosevelt persuaded many of them to take jobs building the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys. While working on this project, they were hit by a hurricane on Labor Day, 1935. It was the most intense hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States. 164 Keys residents were killed that day, along with 259 veterans. The stories from this storm are gripping and I won't go into them here; there are several books that do a better job of it than I could in a little blog entry.
How does this relate to our area? It doesn't. It's just that some of those bonus marchers stayed at my grandfather's house in Washington D.C. all those years ago, and every Labor Day I wonder if any of them went down to work on the highway, and if any of them made it out alive.

Florida Keys at sunset, both photos Canon EOS 20D.

Lazarus Stewart: Colonial Custer

"Massacre of the Indians at Lancaster by the Paxton Boys in 1763." (John Wimer, 1841)

(Wikipedia) - Captain Lazarus Stewart (July 4, 1734 – July 3, 1778) was an 18th century Pennsylvanian frontiersman and leader of the Paxton Boys. He achieved notoriety by leading the massacre of the Susquehannocks in 1763, and was a prominent military commander — on the Yankee side — in the Pennamite Wars. He met his death in battle with the Loyalists and Iroquois at the Wyoming Massacre, in an attack precipitated by his own rashness. Continued

"Massacre of Wyoming"

Letter From Back East: What did your folks do for a living - when they were children?

My parents' families can be very tightlipped on certain subjects. For example: They still haven't told me my father was married & divorced, previous to marrying my mother. I'm 45 years old - I think I can handle it. They are all ancient now, I guess they'll never tell me.
So I wasn't surprised at Christmas dinner, a few years back, when my uncle mentioned that he and my father, and the rest of the family, spent every summer working as migrant laborers, picking crops all over the region. "When was this?" I asked. "Oh, our whole lives growing up," he said. This was in the 20's and 30's.
They picked fruits and vegetables on the Delmarva peninsula, and in York County too. I asked him if he liked the work? "Nah." "How about my dad?" "He hated it." (Interestingly, both men had huge gardens as adults.) "Did the girls work?" "Everybody worked."
The other day, I came across the pictures below, made by Lewis Hine, in the employ of the Maryland Child Labor Committee. They show Baltimoreans, mostly Polish families from Fells Point, working in the fields in 1909. This was a few years before my father's generation, so I guess the Child Labor Committee didn't get very far with its crusade. Continued

Letter From Back East: Powwow doctors

(Falmanac) Powwow doctors were folk healers who practiced a sort of magical faith-healing that was not all that uncommon in what Greil Marcus affectionately refers to as "the old weird America." Powwowism (also known as Braucherei or Hexerei), has little or nothing to do with Native Americans. It has a lot to do with Christianity and can be seen as an adjunct to the organized American faiths; one went to church on Sunday and visited the Powwow doctor on Monday. Said Rev. G. W. Enders, pastor of a rural Lutheran parish near York: "Nearly all of my congregation, perhaps, have been powwowed for, at one time or another. ... I just ignore it." - Time Magazine, December 1928. Not all pastors were that tolerant, folklorist Dennis Boyer writes that "Clergy of all denominations waged a war against Braucherei from the pulpit that lasted from the time of Jefferson to the New Deal."
Powwowism seems peculiar to Eastern Pennsylvania, but it most likely seeped into the surrounding regions as well. (One can easily imagine it traveling west, beside the Kentucky rifle in the Conestoga wagon or in a satchel, steaming along the old mainline.)
Much of the tradition is said to be derived from a book called "The Long Lost Friend" ( "Powwows" was added to the title years later), written by Johann Georg Hohman and first published in Pennsylvania around 1820, though it's said he borrowed heavily from an earlier German text. You can read the entire book online here; it will give you a good idea of the thing in general. It was a practical sort of magic, aimed at quieting fussy babies, bringing good luck, and "getting the cow out of the bog." Hohman's book wasn't the only influence and the practice evolved over the years, varying widely from practitioner to practitioner.
Powwow doctors came in all shapes and sizes: male & female, black & white, part time & professional, and most of them seemed to enjoy a good standing in their communities. But as time went on, Powwowism became the object of ridicule and suspicion.
Things came to a head with the "hex murder" of 1928, when an addled man in York County decided he had been cursed by a Powwow doctor. It all seems a tragedy of errors, but the doctor in question was killed and the addled man, along with two young accomplices, ended up in prison. Powwowism had received mainstream press attention before the murder (see the article from 1911 pasted below), but it was nothing like the attention it got after the murder. I found 13 articles about the case in the New York Times alone.
A few Powwow doctors still practice today, writes David W. Kriebel, Ph.D, though much more quietly than in the past. They are keeping up a tradition that is centuries old in particular - as old as humanity itself in general.

Art courtesy of frakturweb.org

Letter From Back East: The Mysteries of Pit Beef

(Falmanac) Maryland has given the world three great treasures: steamed crabs, Dashiell Hammett, and apparently, pit beef.
I say apparently because, over the past few years, I've read some write-ups on the subject and none of them ring quite true to me.
First off, let me tell you what pit beef is: it is beef [top round], grilled outdoors, sliced thin. It is charred on the outside and pink on the inside. It is served on cheap white bread with copious amounts of horseradish & mayonnaise. Think of it as grilled roast-beef.
Let me tell you what pit beef is NOT: it is not dry rubbed, it is not well-done, it is not served on a kaiser. (Though, if you like it that way, that's fine by me.)
The writers all seem to think it is a recent invention, maybe 20 years old, but I remember pit beef from my childhood in the 60/70's.
It was, back then, often part of a fundraising activity known as a "bull roast." Bull roasts were (are) often held at volunteer fire halls, churches, or in fields. There are bull roasts (summer), bull & oyster roasts (months with R in them), and ham & oyster roasts too.
A proper bull & oyster roast always served fried oysters, raw oysters, crab soup, potato salad, macaroni salad, steak tartare, sausage, and of course, pit beef. These events were usually, but not always, catered.
Tickets to a roast always had the menu printed on the back. It made it that much harder to resist, especially since the roast went on for hours and hours, and was all you could eat. Oh, and there was beer too - lots of it.
Later it seemed, the late 70's or early 80's, pit beef came into a more permanent form as roadside stands, often located in a bar parking lot, and usually open on the weekends only. Today there are pit beef establishments open 7 days a week. Some of them are very good, some aren't: you have to search for the good stuff.
That's what I know about pit beef. If your recollections differ with mine, or you can place the origins of pit beef back beyond my memory, please leave a comment.

A typical roadside pit beef set-up. Note the grill is made from a furnace oil tank.
The diesel stacks are a nice touch.

The real thing: ask for no more, expect no less!

Letter From Back East: There Will Be Corn

Hyde Station, Hydes, Maryland

(Falmanac) The Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad (MA&PA) passed through Hyde & Baldwin, Maryland, which are about a mile apart, and there is a station in each place. The reason for this is while Baldwin, a prosperous little crossroads, was the obvious choice for a station, Hyde (later called Hydes and as lonely then as it is now), featured a cannery. And also because the MA&PA was always hard up for revenue on the Maryland portion of the tracks; they'd stop for a barking dog, if there was the possibility of it buying a ticket.
The cannery sat across the street from the station and a portion of it sat there well into the 1980's until, for no apparent reason, it was torn down. I always liked that little ruin. The cannery itself was instrumental in getting the MA&PA, or one of its predecessors, up and running, as it was used to demonstrate to prospective investors that the line was financially viable. (Which it wasn't really, not at the time.) I read that the railroad took all those investors on an excursion one day, to eat corn.
And that has always stuck with me, and it's why I am such an awful railfan. I didn't care much about the coaches they rode in, or the engine that pulled them, the thing that stuck in my mind was this: Why would those people give up a day to ride a train and eat corn? Were they just playing along, or did they really want to do such a thing? I like to think that they enjoyed themselves. And not because the 19th century was that dull; it wasn't, not for prosperous Baltimoreans.
I imagine it was for the same reasons that my own parents were, in my eyes, so very boring. They weren't dull for lack of wit, or lack of funds, or lack of imagination; they were dull because of history. Rather they were dull for having experienced what is often considered exciting history: The Great Depression and World War Two. After that they didn't want any more excitement. They and their friends were happy to cultivate their gardens; which they did in droves, in the great and new suburbs of America. And that's how I picture those men on that train, Civil War vets, probably most of them, and most of them having more than one sibling or spouse dead at an early age from cholera, or yellow fever, or diphtheria, or whooping cough, and most of them having survived all the "panics" that wiped out fortunes, large & small, every ten years or so back then, sitting on a plush seat contentedly eating a plate of corn and thinking, "this sure beats getting your ass shot off at Little Round Top."

Baldwin Station, Baldwin, Maryland

Photos: Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Letter from Back East: My Dutiful Balloon - Precarious Reconnaissance in The Great War

(Falmanac) While wandering through a churchyard the other day we found an odd line on a gravestone: 28 BALLOON CO. That was a new one. We were a stone's throw from the border of Aberdeen Proving Ground [Maryland] and it got me to wondering if APG was home to a balloon company, and even stranger, what if the guy landed here and was buried on the spot? Well, he didn't land there, dead in a graveyard, but the base was home to the 28th Balloon Company, also a balloon school, and a unit of the 18th Airship, whatever that was.
The balloonists were hoisted in the air in baskets, hanging from little blimps, which were tethered to the ground, in order to see what the enemy was up to. The enemy didn't care for it and would shoot at the balloons. The balloonists were well protected with covering fire to discourage attack, but this didn't deter enemy aircraft from targeting them anyway; there was a whole class of aces known as "balloon busters." The balloonists were equipped with parachutes which they seemed to use rather often.
But it must have been an effective way to gather information as there were a lot of balloon outfits on both sides. According to Stars And Stripes, there were 35 American balloon companies in France during World War One. 23 of the companies were active at the front, making 1,642 ascensions. I imagine the balloonists were a breed apart. Who would take such hazardous duty? One story from Stars and Stripes relates how a French soldier, forced to parachute from his burning craft (Did I mention the balloons were filled with flammable hydrogen?), found himself being strafed by a German plane, the balloonist calmly pulled a pistol from his holster and started blasting away at the pilot. The paper also noted that the members of the balloon corps were usually near the top of the list when it came to generosity, donating liberal amounts of their pay to various charity drives.
By 1923 it was all over; lighter than air technology was on its way out and the army was through with the balloon corps. Nearly a hundred years later, it is just another forgotten aspect of an unpopular time.

Letter From Back East: Mt. Ararat Farms

Note: A friend of mine's blog inspired this one, so I thought, with his permission, I'd run a few of his better posts.


Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 locomotive

(Falmanac) I haven't been to Mount Ararat Farms in 37 years, but passing the sign always brings a smile to my face. My only visit to the place was during a field trip in the first grade.
The first grade was the high point of my education and it was all downhill from there. My teacher was literally "old school," born around 1904, she was close to retirement and had no use for modern education. She eschewed the latest teaching materials, preferring to read to us from "Robinson Crusoe" & the such. And she never, ever, talked down to us - the last of her kind in my school district.
One day we all loaded into the school bus and headed out for a field-trip. We went to the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant, the Conowingo hydroelectric dam, and to Mt. Ararat Farms Dairy. My two most distinct memories of the trip were riding through Port Deposit, and the dairy.
Port Deposit [Maryland] was like no other place I'd ever seen before, it was old, not like the suburbs at all. It had railroad tracks too - with a real live train going by, pulled by a big old black GG1 throwing showers of sparks off the catenary - and the Susquehanna, my first large river.
I remember the dairy because they gave us all milk; it was in some kind of new packaging that never caught on, bags, or triangles, or something.
Today all those things have been denounced. I can see why people don't like nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric dams, but the milk thing has me baffled. Indeed, after tasting the latest crop of margarines, I have (gasp!) gone back to butter. Salted, sweet cream, butter. They say it's bad for me, but all that artificial stuff, margarine, aspartame, children's literature, has always left a bad taste in my mouth.